The Betty Jane Rhodes Centennial

Born a century ago, singer and actress Betty Jane Rhodes (1921-2011).

Rhodes started out as a child performer, singing at local radio stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. This led to paying work as a ghost singer at RKO (providing the voice for onscreen actresses who couldn’t sing) as well as an engagement at the Cocoanut Grove night club, and finally films. She was still a 15 year old kid in her first two screen roles in 1936, Herbert Marshall’s daughter in Forgotten Faces, and Marsha Hunt’s little sister in Arizona Raiders (in which she sang the torch song “Melancholy Baby”). By the following year though she was already playing the female lead in the adventure serial Jungle Jim. Her other films of the ’30s include the all-star The Life of the Party (1937), Stage Door (1937), Having Wonderful Time (1938) and the shorts Hollywood Party (1937), Twenty Girls and a Band (1938), Picketing for Love (1938), Swing Vacation (1939).

In 1939 she briefly had her own radio show, and was dubbed by a California magazine “The First Lady of Television” for her experimental appearances in the brand new medium. Many sources mention her having a TV show in the 1950s. I’ve come across no evidence of this, and assume it’s an error based on an assumption that tv didn’t exist until that time.

In 1940 Rhodes got her first network radio assignment singing on The Fred Allen Show. Then came a spate of additional film roles through the mid ’40s: Oh, Johnny, How Can Your Love (1940), Millionaire Playboy (1940), Along the Rio Grande (1941), They Met in Argentina (1941), Mountain Moonlight (1941), The Fleet’s In (1941), Sweater Girl (1942, in which she introduced the famous song “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You”), Priorities on Parade (1943), Star Spangled Rhythm (1943), Salute for Three (1943), Mardi Gras (1943), You Can’t Ration Love (1944), and one additional short Halfway to Heaven (1944). Her screen career is largely associated with the war-time years.

In 1945, two big changes: she was hired to be a regular on Parkyakarkus’s radio program Meet Me at Parky’s, and she married Willett Brown, co-founder of the Mutual Broadcasting System. After Meet Me at Parky‘s went off the air (1948), she began to focus more on family, though she did continue to sing in nightclubs into the 1960s.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.